EditorialPragmatic marker combinations: Introduction
Section snippets
Perspectives on pragmatic marker combinations
The past decade has seen a steady rise in interest on the part of pragmatics researchers in the combinatory behavior of discourse markers, or, more broadly, pragmatic markers (PMs). While definitions vary, the term pragmatic marker typically denotes a syntactically optional element that does not change the truth conditions of its host construction and tends to occur in its periphery (see e.g., Brinton, 1996 on the characteristics of PMs).1
Contributions to this special issue
The contribution by Crible and Degand (2021) addresses both the co-occurrence question and the ordering question in a corpus-analysis of spoken French. Crible and Degand extract 1502 PMs instantiating 92 types from the corpus. Of this sample they find that 420 instances are PM occurrences that are part of a PM combination. Crible and Degand argue that different degrees of integration of PM sequences need to be distinguished, ranging from “accidental co-occurrence to fixed idioms” (p. 20). In
Conclusions and outlook
Taken together, the papers in this Special Issue extend research on PM combinations in important ways and along different dimensions. The articles clearly corroborate the general finding of strong constraints in PM ordering, as demonstrated again by Crible and Degand. Extending this line of research is the article by Koops and Lohmann, who show that instances of reversible PM sequences may be explained by the functions performed by alternative orders. This finding highlights the importance of
The articles in this special issue
Crible, Ludivine & Liesbeth Degand. 2021. Co-occurrence and ordering of discourse markers in sequences: A multifactorial study in spoken French. Journal of Pragmatics 177. 18–28. doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.02.006.
Izutsu, Mitsuko N. & Katsunobu Izutsu. 2021. Very simple, though, isn't it? Pragmatic marker sequencing at the right periphery. Journal of Pragmatics 182. 118–132. doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.04.007.
Koops, Christian & Arne Lohmann. 2022. Explaining reversible discourse marker
Arne Lohmann is Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of British Studies at the University of Leipzig. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Hamburg in 2011 and received his Habilitation from the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in 2019. He has published on a wide variety of topics, including grammatical variation, word-formation, the phonetics and phonology of grammatical categories, and discourse markers. In his research, he places particular emphasis on
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Cited by (1)
Arne Lohmann is Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of British Studies at the University of Leipzig. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Hamburg in 2011 and received his Habilitation from the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in 2019. He has published on a wide variety of topics, including grammatical variation, word-formation, the phonetics and phonology of grammatical categories, and discourse markers. In his research, he places particular emphasis on rigorous, quantitative investigations.
Christian Koops is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Rice University in 2011. His work in pragmatics applies quantitative (corpus-linguistic, statistical) methods to qualitative (e.g. discourse functional and conversation analytic) questions. In this area, he has published on information structure constructions and discourse markers. Another focus of his research is variationist sociophonetics, specifically the role of phonetic detail in language and dialect contact, with a focus on North American English and varieties of Spanish in the Americas.